Twenty years ago this month my friend Del James came to me with an idea and a kind of last ditch effort to finally get my band a record deal. Make a music video and let me direct it, he said. Ive got these two rad Icelandic dudes, August Jakobsson and Einar Thorsteinsson that will help me shoot it, produce and edit. We will shoot you guys on 16mm black and white film.. well use Steve Danels house and the Troubadour. He went on like a visionary to say something like, Im telling you, today its all about having a music video for you guys so these dummies can understand! And so we did. We must have run around two dozen VHS copies of This World, and started handing them out. At a show we played at The Palace opening for the rock band Extreme (remember them?), our unrelenting and long-suffering manager at the time Joey Meade handed a copy to a young A&R rep named Keith Bailey, and told him, Keith, youre the only one in this town with the balls to sign this band.. you have to do it. The ballsy Keith took our video into the EastWest/Elektra office and played it for his boss, Sylvia most powerful woman in the music business Rhone. The story goes that by the time they got to the first chorus, she told Keith GO baby.. get em! We were signed! We recorded our debut album with Bill Kennedy and Garth Richardson producing at Ardent Studios in Memphis, and A&M Studios Alumni 1969-to in Hollywood. Soon after, Time Warner bought Elektra. And 9 months later we were dropped. Fast forward, twenty years. The internet, Facebook and stuff. I reconnect with August and Einar who tell me they have FOUND the digital beta master of the video we shot in 1994! Only thing is.. its in Iceland (thank you Einars wife for flying our video home to LA). So grateful to Einar for handling the digital transfer. He knew this was something special, and very meaningful to us. So, with perfect occasion being #throwbackthursday AND Tristan Greths birthday, here at long last is the official SOUL video for This World in HD! And, Del James, you were right. Honorable mention in this effort: Marlon Whitfield Robert John Kenny Pierce Jim Barker Kevin Quinn Hugo Stevenson Riki Rachtman Joseph Meade Tom Maguire Tim Propersi Scotty Slam Ken Cissne and so many others (you know who you are). youtu.be/4IwzTl466K0
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 19:30:15 +0000